Portrait of the Artist as a Young Asswipe. Matt Johnson’s film concerns a seminal summer in the nascent career of a young, pretentious punk-ass who eventually grows up to become Anthony Bourdain, capturing, in essence, a young man at the precise crux between his reach and his grasp. As beloved as the later-day Bourdain, the one-time high-end chef, turned tell-all memoirist, and eventual global TV mainstay, became, by his own admission, his early years were pockmocked by fits of self-absorption, self-destruction, and grating irascibility that, to his considerable credit, he has never shied away from (in the film’s epigraph, he refers to himself in that era as a “spoiled, narcissistic brat.”) 

The question, then, is whether or not Destin Daniel Cretton’s new Spider-Man picture, the fourth installment in this series, can keep this positive mojo going. Whereas I’m typically rubbish at the predictive market  —  this is the guy who was convinced Supergirl would do just fine  — if nothing else, the film certainly deserves to be a hit, not something one would have said about many of the more recent bloated, lifeless MCU installments since the groundbreaking Avengers: Endgame back in 2019. 

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore substitutes politics and tyrannical behavior for the fun creatures and captivating missions to transform this experience into a double bore.

Cronin is gifted at setting the table, so to speak, giving us enough unsettling visual detail to infuse a spooky scene with enough macabre energy to keep the viewer jumping. He’s also not afraid to take his films well past the usual, easily forgettable, levels of basic gore of the standard horror film. His kills tend to stick in the psyche: In the course of the film’s more than two-hour runtime, we witness a character get impaled through the throat, not once but twice, a young person forcibly pulling out all the teeth out of their jaw, plenty of bloody sputum, a scorpion lasciviously chewed up and devoured, and a character falling out of a window and getting graphically eaten alive by a pack of coyotes.